


the sun (it will come again)

by the_crownless_queen



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, and sacrificed her for the soul stone?, infinity war fix-it, so remember how in IW Thanos 'loved' Gamora, this isn't love and I refuse, yeah I'm still mad about that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:07:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26270878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_crownless_queen/pseuds/the_crownless_queen
Summary: Thanos jumps when she appears. Had he been anyone else, she might have laughed, but all Gamora feels is hurt and rage and betrayal.Here is the man who calls her daughter and tried to pass off his possessiveness as love. Here is the man who tried to use her life to kill half the universe.“Daughter,” he says, hope ringing in his voice, “have you come to give me the Stone?”Gamora laughs in his face. “There is no Stone,” she lies. “Your sacrifice failed.”
Relationships: Gamora & Guardians of the Galaxy Team, Gamora & Nebula (Marvel), Gamora & Peter Quill, Gamora & Thanos (Marvel)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 37





	the sun (it will come again)

**Author's Note:**

> So I started writing this like, the day I first saw IW two years ish ago? And it's been sat in my WIPs since until I finally decided to motivate myself to finish. It feels... angrier than I expected it to? But also kind of cathartic. I didn't want Thanos' death to be a big thing, so it's kind of almost pitiful? (it's what he deserves)
> 
> Anyway, hope someone out there enjoys this mess ^^  
> Stay safe out there everyone!! :)

Gamora falls.  _ The Soul Stone requires a sacrifice _ , its Guardian had said — and Gamora had laughed, because if there is one thing she knows it’s that Thanos doesn’t love anyone or anything.

She had thought otherwise, once, but whatever Thanos felt for her and his ‘children’ wasn’t love. It couldn’t be.

Gamora knew love. It was painful and sweet, frustrating and maddening, an impossible thing that tied your stomach up in knots and made you feel like you could fly at the same time. Peter and the Guardians had taught her that. Even  _ Nebula _ had taught her that.

But Thanos? The only things her father had ever given her were nightmares and pain.

And that isn’t love.

But here, once again — as it always is with Thanos — what she wants doesn’t truly matter. Only what  _ he _ wants does. 

And so Gamora falls. The ground rushes up to meet her and her head hits a rock — blinding pain, red across her vision, and then nothing. 

And then nothing.  She wakes up with a gasp, bathed in cool water under an alien sun. It is… unexpected. She had never really expected to be this… aware after her death.

She looks around. This is Vormir as it should be, she instinctively knows. Vormir as it was before the Soul Stone came to be hidden there. It looks… Softer. Kinder, perhaps. Like a sunset, when the world is bathed in golds and reds.

She sits up. Despite lying in the water, her clothes are not wet. They do not feel wet — and neither does she. Still, the water ripples around her as she moves, the tiny waves stretching out into the distance, too far for her eyes to see.

“Oh,” she says — states, really. Her eyes are suddenly prickling with hot, frustrated tears, but she blinks them away, looking down at her hands. “I’m dead then. His plan worked.” The words echo in the emptiness that surrounds her.

She doesn’t know how to feel. It almost feels like she’s feeling  _ everything _ — sadness, anger, frustration... Everything but joy, or love.

It’s unfair. Everything about this is unfair — Thanos killing her to get the thing she had spent years hiding from him in the name of  _ love _ , this wispy emotion she’s spent so long trying to untangle from the mess of impressions he had left her with, most of all.

She should have killed herself ages ago, made sure to get rid of the last person who knew where the Soul Stone was. But her search for it had granted her a first taste of freedom and she had gotten addicted, and like all addicts, she hadn’t been able to let go of it.

And so here she is now, alone and dead and stranded in this odd place, in an odd copy of an odd world she had hoped to never set foot on.

If this is to be her afterlife, she wants out. Anywhere — anything — would be better than this.

“It is, and it isn’t.”

At the sound of the lilting voice, appearing out of nowhere, Gamora spins around, reflexes taking over as adrenaline lights her blood on fire, sharpening her focus. 

But still, she punches only air, nearly overcompensating and falling over. Her fist would have connected, she thinks, had she not aimed it about twenty centimeters above where the speaker’s head actually was.

Staring at green skin and dark eyes she has only ever seen in the mirror, Gamora feels herself blanch, stumbling backward, water splashing loudly around her feet.

“This is impossible,” she says, almost in a sigh. “You’re…”

“You?” The girl smiles. It looks out of place on her face somehow, like the muscles aren’t quite made for it, and yet it also seems... just right. A paradox, wrapped in an enigma. “Maybe,” the girl continues. “But I think it’s really more accurate to say that you’re  _ me _ instead.”

She falls silent and starts walking; Gamora follows. They don’t appear to have a destination, and the silence feels oppressive. It makes her nervous.

The last time she had walked on this ground, Thanos had been with her. She almost feels like she can still feel him at her side, his presence a hovering shadow blocking out the light.

She prefers the silence to the sound of his voice, prattling on about his ‘just cause’ and her ‘betrayal’, prefers it to the ‘I love you, daughter’ he had tried to force on her right before he pushed her off a cliff — but she doesn’t like it.

It is too quiet, too  _ peaceful _ . Out there, in the real world, her father is probably enacting his plan to destroy the universe, and she is stuck in there,  _ walking _ beside a silent girl who looks like her but can’t  _ be _ her.

“Who are you then?” she asks, suddenly stopping. Her companion stops too, half a step away — well within arm’s reach.

(She may look like a mere child, but she took Gamora’s form, and Gamora remembers being that young.

Being a child hadn’t stopped her from learning to be deadly.)

“You know who I am.” The child looks at her expectantly, knowledge beyond her years shining in her familiar eyes.

Gamora feels like sitting down. “You’re the Stone. The Soul Stone.” As she says it, she knows it to be true.

The girl nods, grinning now. Even now that she knows, Gamora can’t think of her as anything but a girl — even if this one shares her face and claims to be a magical artifact. 

“And you’re my sacrifice,” the girl says. In her mouth, the word seems more meaningful, almost magical even, but all Gamora can feel is the familiar angry outrage that had overcome her when Thanos had looked at her with tears in his eyes, like he deserved to grieve for her when he had just confessed to wanting to kill her.

She flinches back. “ _ No _ . I refuse — that can’t have worked. It wasn’t. That Guardian said he had to sacrifice something he loves, and Thanos doesn’t love anything. He  _ doesn’t _ .” She’s rambling, she knows, but she can’t help it. She just needs somebody to understand.

(Peter would. Peter would bumble around and crack one of his terrible jokes, but he would understand.)

The girl cocks her head to the side, curious. “Doesn’t he?”

Gamora snarls. “ _ No _ !” The word echoes in the silence.

This time, the girl nods. She smiles. “You’re right.”

It’s like all the air is suddenly gone. Her vision goes gray at the edges with relief. “Then… It didn’t work? The… The sacrifice. It didn’t work?”

The girl doesn’t answer. Instead, she starts walking again, asking, “Didn’t you wonder why the Soul Stone, out of all of them, was the only one to ask for a sacrifice?”

Gamora thinks about arguing that none of those Stones came for free — all of them only ever seemed to spread death in their paths — but somehow she doesn’t think that’s what the girl means. She shrugs.

“I assumed it was because it was the  _ Soul _ stone.” She tries to remember what its Guardian had said, but his exact words escape her. Truth be told, she hadn’t really had much time to think about this sacrifice revelation before she had found herself getting thrown off a cliff, only to end up here, in this odd world, staring into the eyes of someone she’s gradually realizing isn’t just a weird product of her dying mind.

The girl shakes her head, a secretive smile playing on her lips. She looks like Rocket does when he’s about to play a prank on someone — usually Peter — and her heart aches for her friends. For her family.

“No.”

“No?” Gamora repeats, frowning.

“Or perhaps yes.” The girl shrugs, and Gamora burns.

“Alright, that’s enough of this cryptic nonsense!” She snarls and moves forward, intent on grabbing the girl’s arm and shaking some actual answers out of her, but the world spins, and suddenly, she’s standing where the girl was, and the girl is standing where Gamora was.

Disoriented, she stumbles back a step. “What the —”

The girl looks at her pityingly. “The Soul Stone requires a sacrifice —  _ I _ require a sacrifice,” she continues like there has been no interruption at all, “because without it there is  _ no Soul Stone _ .”

“I don’t…”  _ understand, _ except that she does. Oh, she does.

Gamora falters, rocking back on her feet. “What does that mean then?”

The girl cocks her head and hums. “I guess that’s for you to decide. He did feel for you, you know — enough for there to be weight to your sacrifice — even if it wasn’t quite… right.” Her lips curl like she’s eaten something distasteful, and she crosses her arms.

Unwittingly, Gamora mirrors her. “Don’t you mean for  _ you _ to decide?” she asks, her mouth suddenly dry.

The girl shrugs. “Us, then.”

And

the

world

_ shifts. _

* * *

The Soul Stone is borne out of sacrifice; out of losing that which you love most — the one thing that could hold you back.

Because the cost for a soul is a soul.

It isn’t fair, Gamora thinks  _ (is she still Gamora, when an entire universe seems to hum at the back of her mind?). _

But then again, Gamora first learned that life isn’t fair on her own planet as half of her people die and their killer brings her home with him. A fighter, he had called her, but all she had wanted was her mother.

She never sees her again. Never sees her planet again either, nor any of her people.

(Deep inside her heart, she knows why.)

So no, life isn’t fair — after all, that had only been the first instances of many. Too many, really, to remember and count them all. But being a Guardian… having a purpose that wasn’t just killing, that made life worth something.

So of course Thanos had to come and ruin that too.

And she should have been prepared, should have expected it. But Peter and the team and being happy had lulled her into a false sense of safety, and she had let herself go soft, and she hadn’t seen it coming.

It isn’t fair, that she hadn’t seen it coming. And now she is both more and less than she was, and she cannot go back to the way things were.

Just like she cannot return to her planet and see her mother again.

Thanos saw to that, just like he saw to this.

* * *

What is life, in the end? Is it a body, functioning? Is it a heart beating, lungs pumping air in and out? Is it a brain, neurons firing wildly?

Or is it a soul, that unquantifiable entity Thanos mistakenly tried to gain control over?

* * *

Gamora’s body lies at the bottom of the cliff Thanos threw her off of. It is strange, looking at it, but Gamora doesn’t need it anymore.

She is all Soul now.

She looks up and away from her broken body. The cliff is too high for her to see its top, but even if she could, Gamora doesn’t think she would have been able to see Thanos.

But she doesn’t need to see him to know where he is. She can simply sense his soul, now.

Thanos jumps when she appears. Had he been anyone else, she might have laughed, but all Gamora feels is hurt and rage and betrayal.

Here is the man who calls her daughter and tried to pass off his possessiveness as love. Here is the man who tried to use her life to kill half the universe.

“Daughter,” he says, hope ringing in his voice, “have you come to give me the Stone?”

Gamora laughs in his face. “There is no Stone,” she lies. “Your sacrifice failed.”

Behind them, the Stone’s guardian hovers, a silent specter delighting in their torment.

Thanos’ face contorts with rage and he swings at her — but her body isn’t here, and his arm goes right through her.

Gamora doesn’t even feel it.

She is no longer scared of him, she realizes. It makes sense, though — there is nothing he can do to her that he hasn’t already done.

“You failed,” she repeats, and she feels giddy with it.

Because someone else might feel torn about what to do — be burdened by ethics and  _ what is right _ and  _ justice _ — but Gamora isn’t.

She knows what she has to do, and finally, she  _ can _ do it.

It doesn’t matter which Stone he’s already found, in the end. Gamora can feel his soul — a sensation to which no words could do justice — and it is so very easy to just… take it.

She doesn’t keep it, of course, and no matter how powerful he was, Thanos isn’t like her. Without his body or her trying to keep it there, his soul… slips away.

And without his soul… Well, his body falls to the ground with a dull  _ thud. _

It’s almost odd, really. Thanos looks smaller in death.

“Huh,” Gamora says out loud, head cocked to the side. She steps closer. Despite everything her new nature tells her, she almost expects Thanos to rise again — the monster she had once called father and loved had always seemed so invincible — but he doesn’t.

No. She did it. He’s dead now. Gone.

And Gamora remains, more soul than life.

* * *

She finds Peter on Titan, half of their family with him (as well as some extras she hadn’t known before setting her eyes on them).

Nebula is there too. Both of their souls are as familiar to her as her own and something deep with Gamora finally unwinds. She is safe, with them.

(Well, mostly.)

Peter’s soul rings with relief when he sees her, and Gamora smiles back instinctively.

There will be explaining to do, she knows. About what happened, both to her and to Thanos, and about the Stone-that-she-is now.

But that will come later.

Right now, Gamora died and isn’t dead, and when Peter reaches out for her with trembling hands, she lets him touch her.


End file.
